Don't read this if you don't want tour spoilers.

The @U2 blog was posting updates on what U2 was rehearsing in Vancouver this past week, and if you don't want to know one of the songs that is something of a surprise, you should not read the rest of this post.
SPOILER SPACE
Stop now.

Still reading? So someone heard, and I've seen this elsewhere, "An Cat Dubh-Into the Heart." It was widely predicted that there would be Boy material on the tour, but of all the songs on that album I am maybe most delighted to see this pair as a real possibility. Even before news started coming out of the rehearsals, I thought it would be the perfect Boy setlist addition to mesh with the themes of HTDAAB. Why? Because...

1) "An Cat Dubh-Into the Heart" was U2's very first foray into leading listeners musically through an experience of sin and redemption. This experience is a U2 trademark, often done these days live by another kind of pairing: first a song that sets forth evil/sin clearly ("Bad," "Please," "Running to Stand Still") and leaves the audience asking a question ("What hope is there? How do we get out of this?"), and then the overwhelming answer and redemption with "Streets." Since the transmutation of evil into redemption is directly depicted in the HTDAAB book, and since U2 have talked about HTDAAB as "a journey from fear to faith," I'm looking for them to pick that process up with a special vividness live this tour. "An Cat Dubh-Into the Heart" would not suprise me at all as a way to do so.
2) The sin portion of the pair, "An Cat Dubh," has an attractiveness-of-evil theme that fits with "Vertigo." Plus the interest it shows in creating a sort of evil "sound" fits with "Love and Peace or Else" -- for that reason, btw, I also wouldn't be suprised if "Exit" made the setlist. (Hey, when you start taking on evil at the scale they've evidently decided to take it on, you want to pull out all your "evil song" stops for drama. I hear "Exit" as carrying its own redemption inside it, but most people disagree with me.)
3) The redemptive portion of the pair, "Into the Heart," is about rebirth, about becoming an innocent child again. HTDAAB: "I'm at the door of the place I started out from and I want back inside." Enough said.

Of course, a song getting rehearsed is no guarantee it will appear. But we'll know beginning Easter Monday (or Easter Eve if you won tickets to the Great Vigil in LA). That's one heck of a cheeky time for a band boasting, as the Boss put it recently, "one of the greatest and most endearingly naked messianic complexes in rock and roll" to start a tour. Thank God they didn't arrange for exactly fifty days of shows.